This Day in History

February 15, 1934

Niklaus Wirth is Born

Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the programming language Pascal, is born in Winterhur, Switzerland. He received an M.S. from University Laval in 1960, and a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1963. During 1963-1967 he had taught at Stanford, and from 1967 to 1975 he was professor of computer science at the University of Zurich. Since 1975 Wirth has become professor of computer science at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich

Originally Pascal was intended to serve only as a tool for teaching programming. Wirth's another development, Oberon, is rather a combination of a programming language and operating system for single user personal workstations. His most recent project, CADtools for hardware design, aimes to bridge the gap between software and hardware.

Niklaus Wirth has received ACM's A.M. Turing Award, and IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award.